


For the Living

by Scappodaqui



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: (sort of), Angst, Bucky Barnes Feels, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Jewish Character, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 13:19:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6986692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scappodaqui/pseuds/Scappodaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Maybe it’s also the sound of Church bells, suddenly so overwhelming that Sunday morning. Church bells and, all over the neighborhood, posters of Captain America. Flags fly at half mast. Maybe that’s why she can’t abide the idea of a Catholic funeral for Bucky. Flags and posters and songs, all so loud: Captain America was Brooklyn’s son.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>Well, Bucky was her son, and only hers.</i><br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Living

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [For the dead there is no story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3609120) by [hansbekhart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart). 



_Hesed shel-emet._

Burial is the act of lovingkindness.

Naema can remember burying her uncle, her mother, and her father.

_Hesed shel-emet._

Burial is selfless. You return to the earth that which you have, in life, been given.

The gravesite is in Valhalla, New York, an hour’s drive outside of the city. It is surrounded by the solidity of orange-green hills, of weeping willows in the distance. She recalls the fabric tucked under the caskets as they were winched down into the ground. The gravekeepers left a pile of earth beside the grave cut into the ground, its edges sharply, harshly scored.

“It is earth, not dirt,” said the Rabbi. “It is earth we use to cover the bodies of our loved ones, not dirt. We learn: from dust we come, and to dust we shall return.”

When their father died, Abraham stepped forward first to add earth to his grave. He used the back of the shovel. By tradition, they added the first earth to the grave from the back of the shovel, to differentiate this act of burial from filling in any other hole in the ground. To make it a little harder to do than just filling up a hole. They were not meant to use the shovel as a tool, but rather, to use it as a symbol. The respect due to the dead. It was their service to them. Their selfless service.

Then, when the shovel turned over again, when the long line of her cousins had filed in to add their shovelfuls, she had felt a chill. The solid thud of earth had pattered onto the wood of the casket, worked in on its top with the six-pointed star of David. The earth had obscured that, too.

Her relatives had stood at the gravesite and repeated the Mourner’s Kaddish, and had stood in Synagogue for a year afterwards to recite it, too--a duty due to the dead. The Mourner’s Kaddish:

_He who makes peace in his heights  
may make peace for us and all Yisrael._

_He who makes peace…_

Without a burial, the loss of her firstborn son cannot be real. Her oldest son: what mark did she fail to leave on her door? There’s a gold star in the window now. She hates it. She loathes it. She thinks of the stars the Herschels’ cousins were forced to wear in Warsaw, how they wrote home about that and then didn’t write again.

_Hesed shel-emet._

We return to the earth that to which we have given life…

Whose service, and to whom?

It’s wrong. It sounds wrong.

* * *

 

The SSR waited four days to tell them about Bucky’s loss, four days when Jewish custom begs for burial as soon as possible. And the day after they find out is the Sabbath, and there can be no funerals then.

That’s probably why she insists on a Jewish funeral: the weight of those four days. Of being overlooked. It’s wrong.

It’s _wrong_.

Maybe it’s also the sound of Church bells, suddenly so overwhelming that Sunday morning. Church bells and, all over the neighborhood, posters of Captain America. Flags fly at half mast. Maybe that’s why she can’t abide the idea of a Catholic funeral for Bucky. Flags and posters and songs, all so loud: Captain America was Brooklyn’s son.

Well, Bucky was her son, and only hers.

Bucky used to go to Mass with Steve.

So maybe she shouldn’t insist on a Jewish service but she does, she does: she insists on it the way she knows she insisted on Rebecca’s marriage to Sam. In the wake of this terrible loss she feels a deep guilt about everything. Every duty she has required of her children.

Children are meant to honor their parents.

They’re meant to bury them.

She doesn’t know how to do it this way.

This is what the Jews do when there’s a death (there has been a death, hasn’t there?). They sit Shiva, the seven days of mourning. They tear their clothes. She stops Esther and Ruth from doing so; Esther says she wasn’t going to anyhow. Rebecca, of course, came to sit Shiva with her sleeve already torn.

Naema goes through the house and covers all the mirrors with cloth. She watches as the drape of linen obscures the weak shine of winter sun and then her own face. A curtain coming down. Silence. A slow muting of the light.

“Bucky,” Esther says, pulling at the linen that hangs over the vanity on the ground floor, “Would have hated this. Nowhere to see his face.”

“ _You_ hate it,” says Ruth, and Esther slams her palm down on the vanity so hard it rattles.

They all hate it. None of them can believe it, Esther least of all.

Naema can’t believe it.

Bucky _would_ hate this. He’d hate all the mirrors covered up like this. He used to squeeze up behind his sisters and pinch their cheeks while they were applying lipstick. Or he’d look wide-eyed for a long time at his own face, like he couldn’t recognize himself: that was how fast he had grown when he had been fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Wide-eyed at the change in himself, wonder at what he might become.

Naema imagines seeing his face. She imagines pulling the cloth on the mirror aside to see Bucky there, his sideways smile. Her son’s impish smile exposed, like when they played hide-and-seek when they were children; he always picked an easy spot, so the girls could find him. “Sh, Ma!” he would say, putting one finger exaggeratedly to his lips, tugging the tablecloth down again. He was good at hiding, at being quiet, when he had to be.

She wonders if he’s hiding somewhere still.

She’d feel it, if he were dead. She’d feel it the way she felt it when he quickened.

She’d stop seeing his eyes behind every covered mirror, the ghost of his swinging legs in the kitchen chair when he was a baby, the wide-eyed way he’d look around. Or older, the way he let the door bang shut behind him. Then, guilty at its rebound, he’d slide it slowly shut again, stopping to talk, to laugh, to swoop through the kitchen leaving welcome chaos in his wake.

She realizes everyone must feel this way: that it’s not real.

The Rubins down the street have lost two sons. Their cousins in Hungary haven’t written them for months. Which is crueler, she wonders. Knowing, or not knowing? Covered mirrors, or empty ones?

The Evil Eye. The covered mirrors ward it off. It’s a superstition she’d thought she had left far behind, that her parents had left behind in the Old Country.

The Rabbi calls Bucky by his Hebrew name, Baruch ben Petros. Her funny little joke giving him the most goyische middle name that she can think of, Buchanan--a name of one of Peter’s relatives--that nonetheless reflected his Hebrew name. Baruch means, simply, ‘blessed.’

The Rabbi speaks briefly on Bucky’s name, says that he was brought back once from near-certain death: he was blessed.

Naema is not sure.

The Rabbi recites the prayer to commend his soul, _Kel Maleh Rachamim_. Let God bind his soul in the bond of life.

Let God bind his soul, let God protect him and welcome him with mercy.

The Hebrew prayers of mourning are pure and selfless. They offer certain absolution for the dead, and none for the living.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [hansbekhart](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart) for the beta and encouragement to write within her universe.  
> -Links to full prayer of [Kel Maleh Rachamim](http://www.shiva.com/learning-center/prayers/kel-maleh-rachamim/) (sometimes called El Malei Rachamim). Jewish mourning customs were drawn from my personal experience; I'm aware different communities have different practices.


End file.
